Timothy Zahn - The Green And The Gray

Fierenzo gripped the phone tightly, his eyes darting to where Roger sat very still across the coffee shop table. "I can't," he said, keeping his voice steady. "Not yet. I gave my word."

"Something's about to happen to this city, Tommy," Powell reminded him tightly. "If you know anything—anything—you have a sworn duty to report it."

"I've reported as much as I can, Jon," Fierenzo said. "I'm still working on it at my end, just as you are at yours. Trust me a little longer, will you?"

He heard Powell take a deep breath. "We are both going to burn in hell," the other said at last. "All right, a little longer. But that's all. Those soldiers of yours are on their way, and we have no idea when or where or how they're going to hit the city."

"We'll find them," Fierenzo promised, wishing he had even a shred of hope that he could actually do so.

"We'd better," Powell said. "I'll talk to you later."

Fierenzo punched off the phone. "They got away?" Roger asked.

"Of course they got away," Fierenzo bit out. "The idiots let them park their vans right beside a clump of trees."

Roger made a face. "There wasn't anything you could have done."

"Of course there was," Fierenzo snapped back. "I knew what Greens can do. I could have warned them."

"You think they would have believed you?"

"That's irrelevant."

"Hardly," Roger said scornfully. "Lot of good you'd do anyone locked in the psych ward at Bellevue."

"Lot of good I'm doing right now," Fierenzo muttered.

"Melantha's alive and free," Roger reminded him. "That's a pretty fair amount of good right there."

"I suppose," Fierenzo conceded, mentally shaking away the cobwebs. Time to stop feeling sorry for himself and attack this thing logically. "Okay. They've switched vehicles, so we can't shadow them.

If they keep quiet even other Greens can't detect them, so putting Melantha's parents out as spotters won't help. What else have we got?"

"I don't know," Roger said, fiddling with a coffee stirrer. "You suppose the Grays have a way of spotting them at a distance?"

"I doubt it," Fierenzo said. "If they could, they should have nailed Melantha a lot sooner."

"It still wouldn't hurt to run it past Jonah," Roger pointed out, glancing surreptitiously around the coffee shop and lifting his left hand.

"Okay, but just ask him about Green detectors," Fierenzo warned. "Don't tell him why we need to know. Or what was in Caroline's message."

Roger frowned. "You're not going to tell them?"

"Not yet," Fierenzo said. "I don't want anyone else in the picture until we have a plan." But—

"No argument," Fierenzo said, glaring across the table. "I'm not in the mood."

Roger glared back, but nodded. "Fine," he said. Twitching his little finger, he lifted his hand to his cheek.

This was, Smith groused silently to himself as he drove slowly through the streets of Stony Hollow, turning out to be a truly rotten day.

He'd alerted Powell and Cerreta to the existence of the white vans, only to have the drivers of those vans somehow elude thirty cops and escape. He'd located Caroline Whittier, only to get run off the road and lose her. He'd called in the description of the red Ford pickup, including its plate number, only to be told that it hadn't been spotted since it disappeared from Smith's own sight over that hill.

On the other hand, he hadn't officially clocked in for work today down at the Two-Four, and even though Powell had assured him he would take care of it, he suspected his partner Hill would be claiming a big chunk of his hide when he did show his face at the station house again.

And now here he was, driving around in a slightly banged-up car through the modest towns scattered along the highway, looking for God only knew what. It would have been so much handier if the men in the vans had abandoned them somewhere near where they'd picked up their new rides; say, beside a car-rental agency or bus station. But they'd been smart enough not to leave behind any such obvious pointers.

But Caroline Whittier and the old woman she'd been riding with might not have been so clever. If they'd ditched their pickup somewhere around here, and if he could find it, maybe he could figure out what the whole bunch of them were now driving.

It was a faint hope, he knew. But at the moment it was the only game in town. At least it was better than going back to Manhattan and facing Officer Hill.

Ahead, an increased speed-limit sign marked the edge of this particular town. Speeding up, keeping his eyes peeled, he headed for the next.

Cerreta didn't quite slam the phone down as he hung up, but he wasn't all that far from it. "No, I take it?" Powell asked, cupping his palm over the mouthpiece of his own phone.

"Even less than no," the lieutenant confirmed with a scowl. "He said he might just refuse my next warrant request, too, just to make up for interrupting his morning with this one."

"It didn't matter to him that a cop is missing?" Powell asked, feeling a fresh twinge of guilt over the lie.

"Sure it did," Cerreta said sourly. "He said that if we can prove Tommy's disappearance is connected with these people, he'll be happy to entertain our request for a warrant. Only we can't prove that." He lifted his eyebrows. "Or can we?" he added, his eyes suddenly very steady on Powell's face.

It took Powell two tries to get the word out. "No."

"Because I'd hate for something to happen to him if someone else could have prevented it," Cerreta went on, that half-suspicious look still on his face.

"Yes, sir," Powell said. "So would I."

Cerreta held his gaze a moment longer, then gave a microscopic nod. "Anything new with Messerling?"

Powell lifted his phone slightly. "He's activating S.W.A.T. units all over the city," he said, relieved to be on firmer ground. "I've got Hill and Grosvenor checking with DMV for any other vehicles registered to those restaurants."

"While we're at it, we'd better put someone on the restaurants themselves," Cerreta decided, picking up his phone again. "Outside and in. No law against a cop having a cup of coffee in the restaurant of his choice."

There was a click in Powell's ear. "I've got a preliminary deployment schedule now," Messerling's voice said. "You want to take this down?"

Powell scooped up a pen and pad. "Go ahead."

"No soap," Roger said, lowering his hand. "Jonah says they don't have any way to distinguish Greens from humans, at least not at any distance. Our infrared signatures are similar, we look pretty much the same on a sonic pattern readout, and entropic metabolism detectors are no good beyond about five feet."

"What the hell's an entropic metabolism detector?" Fierenzo lifted a hand. "Never mind—it doesn't matter. What about those metal brooch things?"

"The trassks?" Roger shook his head. "He said they're not going to show up as anything other than ordinary metal. It's the Green psychic manipulation ability that makes them work. We could still watch for people wearing them, I suppose."

"Assuming they're stupid enough to leave them out in the open instead of in their pockets."

"There's that," Roger conceded. "What do you think they're planning?"

"Well, the basics seem obvious," Fierenzo said. "They're assuming you've relayed Caroline's disinformation to Torvald, which means they expect Grays to gather at the north end of the island to wait for the phantom Damian and his Warrior escort to show up. That gives Nikolos the choice of coming up right behind them—say, over the George or the Triborough—and slaughtering them while they're facing the wrong direction, or else coming up into Lower Manhattan to take out the women and children who've been left behind in supposed safety."

Roger shuddered. "Or head directly into Brooklyn and Queens, where the bulk of the Grays still live."